Developer relations reading

State of DevRel: 2022 Origin: Survey results from 2022.

DevRel Directory (2nd tab, below the fold)

"What is Developer Relations"

Wikipedia: "an umbrella term covering the strategies and tactics for building and nurturing a community of mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and developers (e.g., software developers) as the primary users, and often influencers on purchases, of a product."
What is Developer Relations (and why should you care)?: "Developer Relations is the umbrella term for the team whose primary responsibility is building a community both online and offline."
Developer-Evangelism.com: "A developer evangelist is a spokesperson, mediator and translator between a company and both its technical staff and outside developers."
DeveloperRelations.com: "DevRel, or developer relations, is a process for nurturing mutually beneficial relationships between organisations and software developers. In other words, it’s a collection of strategies and tactics that help companies to work better together with software engineers. Exactly what developer relations teams do and why they do it depends on what their organisation needs."
What is Developer Relations and What are Common Roles?: "Developer relations is a mindset of getting developers to adopt a platform and making them successful with their initiatives rather than attempting to sell to those developers."
commudle.com: "Developer Relations (DevRel) is the team that interacts with software developers outside the company to spread awareness and knowledge about the company’s products. The end goal is to attract developers (the people who create apps and hardware), build a community of supporters and evangelists, and increase the likelihood that developers will successfully adopt and use the products the company releases."
ZDNet: "Developer relations is an interesting role in that it somewhat straddles the product, engineering and marketing units within an organization. Chiefly, the purpose of developer relations is to promote a company's software tool to the wider developer community and figure out exactly what developers need from said tool in order to make it work from them. This feedback is then taken back to other teams within the organization so any issues and improvements can be made."
DevRel.co: "Marketing activities that connect developers and in-house manufactured goods/services."
Seldon.io: "Developer Relations is the department that glues everything together and solves these challenges. Experts in the product, the industry and with the relevant soft skills to do public speaking engagements and manage communities."
"Defining a Career Path for Developer Relations": "Developer Relations (DevRel) is an interdisciplinary role that sits in a border space between product, engineering, and marketing."
Developer Avocados: ""
Developer Relations, what is it and how do I get in? (Pursuit Podcast)
Introduction to Google Developer Relations: ""

Articles/Posts

"When, Why, and How to Build a Developer Relations Team"
"Defining a Career Path for Developer Relations"
"What is Developer Relations" (Forbes.com)
Planning a Developer Relations Strategy - Matthew Revell of Hoopy
The History of Developer Evangelism:
A Developer Relations Bill of Rights: Every person who does the work of Developer Relations deserves to be supported by an environment which follows these 10 principles:
1. A clear set of business goals: Every developer relations professional should know how their work contributes to helping their organization achieve its business goals.
2. A well-defined place in the organization: Developer Relations staff deserve clear lines of reporting, with well-articulated lines of accountability.
3. A structured way to impact product or platform: Developer Relations often has the clearest insights into specific needs from the community, and should have a defined way of sharing those insights with the product or platform team.
4. Open lines of communication to marketing: Developer relations must be able to collaborate on messaging, communications and outreach efforts to ensure that marketing and Dev Rel initiatives are coordinated and coherent.
5. The right tools specifically designed for the job: Developer Relations professionals deserve the same level of support and technical infrastructure that other disciplines rely on to execute, measure, automate and improve their work.
6. Explicit ethical and social guidelines: Developer Relations can only succeed if it’s carried out with a mind to the social impacts that technology is having on society, and explicit guidelines help ensure that responsibility is fulfilled.
7. Support for building inclusive communities: Developer Relations needs resources, support and education to carry out its critical role in making sure every type of developer gets to create technology by ensuring that coding communities are inclusive of creators from every background and of every identity.
8. Clear distinction from sales engineering: Developer Relations needs to work closely with every other team in the organization, but its relationship to sales must be explicitly defined so that Dev Rel isn’t required to act as sales engineering.
9. Ongoing resources for professional development: Developer Relations is a rapidly-evolving, constantly-changing field, which means that organizations must provide support and investment for professional development to keep team members up to date with advancements in Dev Rel.
10. Connection to a community of peers: Developer Relations practitioners need access to peers for learning and sharing through events and online community.
The Core Competencies of Developer Relations: "Developer Relations are the canonical source of truth, both for 3rd party developers looking for documentation, best practices, and training, and for internal engineering teams who need to understand the thoughts and experiences of 3rd party developers, and to get candid technical feedback on their developer offerings. ... Engineers don’t trust people who aren’t engineers, so Developer Relations needs to be made up of developers. Even then, they won’t trust just any engineer — we need to prove ourselves. ... Your developer relations team needs to create material that solves problems, as well as being inspiring, interesting, and entertaining. ... Developer Relations’ goal is to work with the largest developer audience possible, and creating a diverse Developer Relations team full of legit engineers makes it inclusive of a wider audience. ... Developer Relations can’t be cheerleaders, or sales people in disguise. They should make a horse aware of water, demonstrate how the water can help it, lead it to the water, and make the water as easy as possible to drink. ... A good developer relations team will push back against advocating a product if they don’t believe they can honestly promote it and advocate for it. ... In order to build trust with 3rd party developers, and represent them to internal engineering teams, Developer Relations needs to be a part of the ecosystem. ... Developer Relations is the voice with which you speak to your developer audience — it’s important that they speak often, and loudly. ... There are around 20 million developers in the world, spread across over 200 countries — so everything Developer Relations does needs to have a strategy to scale that doesn’t require a linear growth in team size."
What does a developer evangelist/advocate do?:
- Outbound tasks:
  - Be a social media presence
  - Keep up to date with competition and market
  - Create openly available software products
  - Participate in other products
  - Participate in public discussions
  - Participate in other publications
  - Create video tutorials
  - Participate and help with events
  - Act as a “firewall” for internal teams
  - Help dealing with influencers
- Inbound tasks:
  - Stay up to date and participate in products
  - Keep product teams and internal engineering up to date
  - Amplify messaging of internal teams
  - Coach and promote internal talent
  - Report on events and success of campaigns
  - Help organising events
  - Work with PR, legal and marketing
  - Give constructive feedback to the product teams and get questions answered
  - Collate outside feedback and convert to constructive feedback

Conferences

(Those conferences which are "meta" about DevRel (that is, they talk about DevRel itself--not just about develoeprs or developing software).)

DevRelCon

DevRelX Summit

Resources

(from AndyPiper)

Other 📚 Books

📰 Communities / Newsletters / Resources

DevRel Collective - Slack (formerly, EvangelistCollective)
Awesome-Devrel - List of lots of things DevRel-related
DeveloperRelations.com from Hoopy.io - weekly email newsletter, blog, good resources.
These are the folks who run DevRelCon and DevXCon. The videos from those events are available online.
DevRel Weekly - weekly email newsletter / summary of interesting links, from @mary_grace
Developer Avocados Weekly
API Evangelist - Kin Lane's API-centric blog
The HackDay Manifesto - an Open Source handbook for running hackdays.
Virtual DevRel - videos from the Virtual DevRel meetups, on YouTube
devevangelist - @theSteve0's repo of resources
Devocate
devrel tag on DEV.to - lots more reading

📝 Classic blog posts

Starting Strong in Developer Relations - a very good and length piece by Alex Trost "Understand your company. Learn your product. Meet your people." - I love this.

Twitter lists

Tags: reading devrel

Last modified 30 December 2022